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Comment by grillvogel | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much cheaper macs would be if their primary purpose was tracking users to deliver ads

I haven't seen any suggestion that Chromebooks are somehow directly subsidized by Google - are Samsung, Toshiba, etc. getting some kind of kickbacks for making and selling the hardware? ChromeOS itself is free to license for vendors [1] But most have fairly low-end CPUs, not much RAM, and small SSDs, so I don't think they compete with Apple for features, per se.

1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook#Sales_and_marketing

I think you answered your own question:

  > ChromeOS itself is free to license for vendors

If it's free, it's for a reason.

That same logic applies to the Linux kernel, right?

Chrome OS is not open source.

Chromium OS is, though.

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os

yeah but how many of these K-12 educational chromebooks are going to get that installed on them? these just allow google to start tracking people even earlier in life than they may have otherwise been able to.

Once again, in what manner are these Chromebooks tracking people more than alternatives would? And I take it from your comment that you're implying Chromium OS tracks people less?

Student chromebooks are not tracked

Not really, the linux is a volunteer effort spearheaded by a non-profit where members take advantage of the advance of the kernel for their own products/ideals, while Google is very much a for-profit corporation which benefits here by the increase in users for their services. Services which are ad-supported for the most part.

I gather that you're implying the primary purpose of Chromebooks is tracking users to deliver ads?

Are users tracked any more on a Chromebook than a) a MacBook Air running Chrome b) a MacBook Air running Safari?

My answer to both is "I don't know, but probably".

There's not really any way to know based on the current information I have access to.

So your answer is "I think so, therefore I assume so without any justification"?

It's like the comment is saying I use OSX but not a broswer or the Internet so I'm not being tracked.

> Are users tracked any more on a Chromebook than a) a MacBook Air running Chrome b) a MacBook Air running Safari

Can you use a Chromebook without being logged in to a Google account? Can you block ads, trackers, and other creepy JavaScript on a Chromebook? Even the ones from Google?

Using a chromebooks without logging in with a google account is painful (as you have no local state without that), so there's that.

You can run all Chrome extensions, including µblock , adblock , privacy badger, ...

> Can you use a Chromebook without being logged in to a Google account?

That's a good point. You log in to the OS via a Google account. You can log out of that account from Chrome-the-browser, though. (In fact it looks like I'm currently only logged in to my employer's Google Apps account, and nobody's told https://accounts.google.com about my Chromebook account.) And I log into my Chromebook with a dedicated Google account, but I realize that not everyone will.

However, you can install Privacy Badger or anything else that you could install on other Chrome platforms, and it should effectively block Google's cookies from reaching other domains. There's probably some JS involved in running the browser itself that's shipped on the device, but if you want to avoid all google.com-delivered JS, you should be able to do that. (I believe this is no different from Chrome on the Mac.)

The main targets of Chromebooks are not tracked for ads

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